1. Field
The present disclosure relates generally to data processing and computing systems, and more particularly, to a method and system for file management of checked out or open files of a source control management repository.
2. Description of the Related Art
The IT world is in a constant state of flux with new technologies, applications and platforms being constantly developed. In this ever-changing environment, application development managers and Chief Information Officers need to eliminate as much risk as possible. Most organizations must manage or support complex multiplatform applications that span the enterprise, including the mainframe server. For example, an online ticketing program for an airline has a web front-end. Its browser-based interface is connected to a back-office application on a UNIX server that also interacts with a DB2 database on the mainframe. While the application has components on several different platforms, it is still considered a single application because it serves a single business purpose—managing airline ticketing processing.
Additionally, the teams working on these complex, multi-tiered projects may be deployed around the world to take advantage of “follow-the-sun” development. For example, at the end of their day, a team in California hands off its development projects to a team in Japan, who then turns it over to a third team in the UK, and that group turns it over to a team in New York and so on.
Furthermore, presently a majority of applications have a web front-end—with all the associated HTML pages and web content—to capitalize on Internet-driven business opportunities. Therefore, Change Control Management (CCM) solutions have emerged as essential infrastructure components in the enterprise-wide application development arena.
Change Control Management software provides life cycle management, source version control and configuration management capabilities. Conventional source control management products are designed to manage code changes as they are checked back into the source control repository. With today's distributed environments and multiple projects underway, developers have many unfinished projects on their machine's that are not checked back up in the source control repositories for long periods of time. Every developer and organization is at a great risk for not managing the code that is not included the checked-in file repository.
Currently, developers have to manually remember the physical location from where the files were checked out and manually backup these files. Then, the developers have to remember the correlation between the physical locations of the file, the software packages it is associated with and the actual backed up location. With a single user involved in a project generally having multiple machines and multiple projects, the problem of keeping track of the checked out files for all the different projects is a very cumbersome and tedious process. This makes it hard to manage multiple files for a single developer and nearly impossible to achieve at an enterprise level.
Therefore, a need exists for techniques to allow users, developers and administrators to easily and conveniently manage checked out or open files from a source control repository.